It is easier
for us to respond somewhat sympathetically to people with visible disabilities-
blindness, profound deafness, wheelchair-bound, intellectual disabilities, or
other conditions for which a visual inspection suffices to tell us that the
person has a disability. Whether or not we are truly helpful, we at least try
to make certain minimum humane accommodations. We certainly don’t have the
expectation that a wheelchair-bound person will walk, or a blind person will
drive.
Yet we routinely
have such expectations for our struggling students in school. We expect them to
memorize their multiplication tables, long poems, work multi-step Math
algorithms, learn non-phonetic spelling, or write five paragraph essays, when they
have clearly and repeatedly tried and demonstrated that they can’t.
And then
they are labeled as either lazy or stupid. Remedies vary- parents might arrange
for after-school tuition, may shame the child for ‘bringing a bad name’ to the
parents, may even beat him. Teachers will ignore and give up on such a student.
They have enough to do, and can’t afford to spend time on a ‘lazy’ student. I met
a few students who were asked to leave their school. Not only do we not help them, we heap abuse on them. A unique problem of this set of students.
There is a
fallacious assumption that the child is underperforming just to be ‘bad’ or to
annoy the teacher. Teachers and parents will assign various motives to the
student; yet they don’t even consider that the child may be underperforming
because he clearly cannot do the work. If a student has a learning disability,
it is unrealistic to expect that the child will improve with more of the same
kind of teaching, yelling at him or her, blaming their parents, shaming or
ignoring.
Children want
to please adults. It’s very innate. Babies smile at their caregivers, toddlers
read their parents’ faces to look for a smile or approval to indicate that they
are doing a good job. Many new parents play a game of scowling at their infants
and laughing when they cry. (For some reason, this amuses parents; I’ll never
understand why…) There was an experiment conducted with toddlers crawling on
all fours across the floor. When the floor changed from solid wood to clear
glass, they stopped at the edge of the change and looked at their parents
faces. If the mom was smiling, they continued assuredly across the floor. If
the mom appeared anxious, they stopped. Such is the power of the smile on kids.
From such a young age, children want to please adults, get their cues from
them, and earn their approval. This trait continues through life- until it is
killed by institutional cruelty and apathy. Children do want to please their
teachers; but we have to earn their trust by helping them succeed. Would the
babies trust their smiling parents if there was no glass floor at all, and they
had fallen off the edge of the solid floor?
These chronically
struggling students have an established record of underperformance and quickly
acquire a reputation as lazy. Older students might have acquired negative behavior
patterns as a coping strategy. They may be apathetic, defiant,
passive-aggressive, depressed, off-task or distracting. They may play the part
of class clown in order to attract negative attention. They embrace these
negative personas as a mask to cover up their academic failures. These behaviors
are not the cause of their academic problems, but rather the result of
continued failure on the part of the teaching establishment to address their
needs effectively.
Blind or
deaf students, students on the autism spectrum, or with cerebral palsy, etc,
have schools that cater to their specific needs. While I don’t necessarily
agree with the concept of a segregated education, at least it is acknowledged that
a different kind of system needs to be used to educate students with different
needs. Students with learning disabilities, on the other hand, don’t fit into
any of these schools, nor can they succeed in their regular classes. They are
truly invisible, the most under-served section of our students. I feel for them.
Ignoring this
section of the school population does have a negative impact on us as a society-
it comes back to bite us. These are the students who have sufficient general
intelligence to blend into society as adults, yet will have acquired no useful
or marketable skills in school. Hence they are underemployed, bitter, and at
loose ends. They might be the ones spraying graffiti, getting involved in petty
crime, becoming con men, sitting on compound walls, idling with similar
friends, winking and whistling at our daughters in the evening hours, and
generally being a menace.
It is in our
interest as a society to educate every student in our classrooms, not just the
smart ones. The smart students can, and will succeed, with or without teachers.
They are motivated, and have no processing disorders to hold them back. It is
the struggling student who truly needs our help, empathy, skills and time. In him
or her lies our true test of teaching, and our humanity.
And, yes, learning disability is a real disability.
And, yes, learning disability is a real disability.
